Dare Me: Megan Abbott’s Indirect Challenge?
I read Megan Abbott’s new novel Dare Me with considerable apprehension. First, it’s about cheerleaders, and secondly, unlike her previous novels it’s set in the unromantic, technological present world of Facebook, texting and tweeting. To me, that seemed a vacuous combination.
Abbott, however, does not give us dumb cheerleaders, and Dare Me owes a debt to other examinations of the dark side of High School such as Heathers. The story opens with the cheerleading squad anticipating the arrival of their new coach. Beth, the captain of the squad, expects to rule over her in the same way she controlled the last coach. But this new coach is hardly a push-over, and her training regimen is both modern (smoothies and yoga) and incredibly tough. Addy, Beth’s best friend and the protagonist of the story, is drawn to the new coach, whilst Beth schemes to bring her down.
Yet what Abbott does so thrillingly in The End of Everything, namely believably maintain her protagonist’s sometimes-wonder-sometimes-surprise-sometimes-facination with the situation wherein she finds herself, seems forced in Dare Me. This flaw led to a lack of sympathy for Addy, who although more naive than Beth, seems complicitly involved in a hard-boiled world. Strangely, it is the mostly absent, almost-a-cipher, work-a-holic husband of the coach that I felt closest to. Like Nick Papadakis in James M.Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, he is the hardworking man who has done little wrong besides make the mistake of marrying a woman who is selfish and self-obsessed. When Coach embarks on an affair with an Army recruiter, she tries to explain her relationship to her ingenue Addy, who has earlier with Beth witnessed them in flagrante. But Coach’s explaination feels as hollow and self-obsessed as the cheerleaders she coaches:
People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into wanting things you can’t help wanting. You can’t be afraid.
Just as frustrating was the almost pure evilness of Beth, Addy’s best friend and the captain of the team. Perhaps this is because I was an athlete: I played elementary, middle, high school and even university sports, but I never heard a woman talk like Beth nor scheme like Beth. Aside from being a prime manipulator, Beth talks to her squad like the expletive-laden Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket:
Let’s get started, kitties, Beth says. The Celts wait for no sad-ass chicken hearts […]
Whip your heads, she says, and we do.
Make your clasps sharp, she says and we do.
Make your faces like you’re wired for pleasure, she says and we gleam ecstatic.
Give ’em the best blow-job smiles you got.
And
Hella bitches, she bellows, rocking her feet on the bench so that is shudders. Our scout, I can feel her out there, waiting. And, bitches, she is so ready to be f****d.
All this to say that I found the social vision too bleak and too unbelievable. In comparison, the TV show The Wire, whose troubling yet superbly executed season 4 confronts the harsh realities of inner-city Baltimore’s school system, still retains amidst its bleakness the hope of compassion, of justice, even of morality, that Dare Me lacks. Dare Me presents a dystopic society, wherein Coach corrupts her charges with wine and boys whilst hypocritically claiming the upper moral hand to their own fumbling high school experiments with the same. Even deaths or near-deaths, which James M. Cain used as a kind of reckoning, mean very little in this confused world, and relationships, forged out of feelings of possession, self-hatred or selfish desires are difficult to find sympathy with.
Abbott’s impressive back catalogue, her skill and her vision all ‘dared me’ not to like this book. But I will, in this one instance, prove her wrong.
As it is Jubilee year, I thought I might share with you a charming anecdote by the American comedian Dan Rowan about his meeting with Queen Elizabeth II in 1972. I only discovered who Dan Rowan was when I was doing some research on the American crime writer John D. MacDonald and found that the two men were friends and a book of their correspondence, A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald 1967-1974, was published in 1986. I acquired a copy, and it quickly became one of my favourite books. I’ve blogged about it before here and here. Dan Rowan was a nightclub comedian who with his friend and professional partner, Dick Martin, hit the big time with the success of their television sketch show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. At the advice of mutual friend Virginia Caldwell (wife of writer Erskine Caldwell) Rowan and MacDonald became pen pals, despite having never met before. The two men quickly become close friends, and their letters are thrilling, funny and moving to read. In some ways their friendship is unequal, with MacDonald being the more senior figure, and Rowan is somewhat deferential to the writer whose Travis McGee novels he had admired for years. They discuss many subjects, but the bulk of the correspondence concerns the pressures Rowan experiences of being involved at every level in a hugely successful television show. At the height of their fame in 1972, Rowan and Dick Martin were invited to host the Royal Gala Variety Performance. After the show, when Rowan met the Queen and Prince Philip he was surprised at how much they seemed to know about him.
Now there was pandemonium backstage as we were all lined up according to someone’s sense of importance. Well, not all, since the acrobats and several others were on the back line craning necks, to be introduced to ER II. Until then I was not nervous but all of a sudden noticed a certain clamminess in the palms. Dick and I were first in line and he was standing on the wrong side of me so that when Sir Lew Grade, who had arranged the entire affair, came along just ahead of H.M. he mistakenly introduced Dick as “Dan Martin” and I am astounded to report that H.M. smiled at Dick, looked at me as she took my hand and said to Sir Lew, “No, this is Dan. That’s Dick Martin.” She held my hand for a time, released it and instead of moving on as I expected, stopped and stared at me for a moment and then said, “And you have come all this way to do this for Us?” “A pleasure, Ma’am,” I gallantly replied. “Do you do this sort of thing often?” “No, Ma’am.” She waited. “We are usually too busy.” I waited. “All this way,” she murmured. “It certainly was very kind of you.” She hesitated and then moved down the line and shook hands with others, stopping again further down when she spoke to Richard Attenborough. A fine actor. He had made a cameo appearance with the Comedians.
Next was Prince Philip who also held my hand a long time, and then clapped his other hand over it and said, “What is this hideous nonsense I hear your show is going off the air?” I was again very surprised and stumbled in answering, “Not at all, Your Highness. We start again this year for the sixth season.” He dropped my hand and said, “Jolly good. That show keeps me home.” And from all I heard rumored around London, the Queen would be glad of anything which kept this playboy home. Well, there’s more but it just occurred to me that you’re both commoners and couldn’t understand it. Ho hum, must buzz off now and polish my tiara. More later if you’re good.
Dan
This story seems to capture everything that still fascinates us about monarchy forty years later. The Queen is disarming, Prince Philip unguarded in his remarks, and Dan Rowan’s fascinated but irreverent tone seems to be just right. MacDonald wrote back:
You know, that was one fine letter too about the Queen and all. […] I want to hear more about the dandy little Queen. When are you coming to tell us. We wait impatiently here (we commoners). I hope you haven’t been such a fool as to wash your hand.
Three months after the Gala Performance, Rowan and Martin were a guest of President Nixon at his La Casa Pacifica home ‘the Western White House’ in San Clemente. Nixon had guest starred on Laugh-In during the 1968 presidential campaign. Nixon must have held the two comedians in high regard as they performed a sketch for him as part of his private birthday celebrations in 1973. In fact, it was only when I began researching this post that I discovered that the Royal Gala Variety Performance that Rowan writes about is different from the annual Royal Variety Performance. The distinction is that in a Gala performance the artists are picked at the specific invitation of the Monarch, thus explaining why the Queen and Prince Philip knew so much about Rowan. Sadly, Dan Rowan’s career went into decline after Laugh-In ended in 1973, but it is remarkable to discover that while the show was still on the air, just how many fans in high places Rowan had.
Orson Welles as Klingsor in Where is Parsifal?
At the beginning of the year I wrote a piece for this blog titled Terence Young: The Man Who Would be Bond. Young was a British film director best known for directing three of the first four James Bond films. He served his country with distinction in the Second World War and later went on to direct some impressive films. After the 1960s his career declined, and he had the dubious distinction of directing what is generally regarded as one of the worst films ever made – Inchon (1981). This critically panned film portrayed the titular Korean War battle and was financed by Unification Church founder Sun Myong Moon. Odd, dubious sounding projects marred Young in his last years. He is rumoured to have directed or edited a propaganda film for Saddam Hussein titled The Long Days (1980). The rumour has never been proven, but I explored the possibility of it being true in the original post.
Recently, quite by chance, I came across Young’s name again. I was on the British Film Institute’s website reading about their list of 75 most wanted lost films. The most recent film on the list is Where is Parsifal? (1984). This bizarre film was screened at the Cannes film festival and then seems to have disappeared. It features a stellar cast including Orson Welles, Tony Curtis, Peter Lawford and Donald Pleasance but was savaged by the few critics who saw it. From what I can discover of the plot, it appears that Tony Curtis plays Parsifal, an eccentric hyponchrondriac who has invented a laser skywriter and is trying to sell the patent. A cast of oddballs descends on Parsifal’s castle, and a series of frenetic comic episodes ensue. The BFI has scanned an original programme of the film screening which lists the production team, and when I saw it one named jumped out at me. The executive producer of Where is Parsifal? was one Terence Young. There is no mention of the film on Young’s imdb page, but the BFI site indicates the film was produced by Young and Slenderline productions, who only appear to have one credit, so I assume it was Young’s own shortlived production company. Intriguingly, one of the cast members of Where is Parsifal? was the wonderfully intense Polish character actor Vladek Sheybal. Sheybal appeared in many spy films including, most memorably, From Russia With Love (1963) directed by Young himself. In an article about Sheybal, David Del Valle claims the producers of Where is Parsifal? lied to the then morbidly obese and dying Orson Welles about his role in the film:
It was the second feature with Sheybal and Orson Welles, who was, by then, huge and still trying to raise money to direct again. Welles had taken the role because the (lying) producers had promised to back his planned version of King Lear.
It’s sad to think that Welles was exploited in the making of this film and Young may have been complicit in it. The BFI webpage on Where is Parsifal? appears to be down right now so I can’t link to it, but needless to say if you happen to know about a copy of the film the BFI would like you to get in touch.
UPDATE: A copy of the film has now been found! Read more here.
Black Dahlia Avenger II
Black Dahlia Avenger II
I have just finished reading Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger II. For those of you unfamiliar with Hodel’s research and writing on the Black Dahlia case, let me give you a little background. Steve Hodel is a retired LAPD Homicide Detective. Hodel’s father, Dr George Hill Hodel, died in 1999 at the age of 91, and Steve Hodel subsequently found two photographs amongst his father’s possession which he believed at the time to be of Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, the victim of the most brutal and notorious unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. Hodel started an investigation which examined the potential connections between his father and Elizabeth Short. Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that his father murdered Elizabeth Short after being inspired by the Surrealist art work of Man Ray. Hodel puts his thesis forward convincingly, and thrillingly, in the original Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). I first came across the Black Dahlia case after reading James Ellroy’s celebrated novel The Black Dahlia (1987). I would heartily recommend Hodel’s book as compelling in its vivid portrayal of LA and the LAPD in the 1940s and 50s. Hodel maps out connections between the Surrealist art movement, Hollywood, organised crime and the LAPD. His research has become influential, inspiring more books on the topic, such as the excellent Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss. In Black Dahlia Avenger II, Hodel presents a follow-up to his original investigation. It is not as groundbreaking as the original, but it is full of interesting research and a must-have for anyone who is fascinated by the Black Dahlia case.
Lunchtime Classics
Readers in the Merseyside area might be interested in this. I’m giving a talk on James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential and a reading from the novel at Waterstones, Liverpool One, in July as part of their Lunchtime Classics series. I’ve posted the details below, including other talks in the same series:
Tuesday 19th June, 12pm: Dr Angie Macmillan (The Reader Organisation, editor of the A Little Aloud, anthologies) on Tove Jansson’s ‘The Invisible Child’.
Tuesday 10th July, 12pm: Andy Sawyer (Director of MA in Science Fiction Studies at University of Liverpool, Science Fiction Foundation Collection librarian) on John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.
Wednesday 18th July, 12pm: Steven Powell (Ph.D researcher, University of Liverpool, editor of Conversations with James Ellroy) on James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential.
All events will be held at Waterstones, Liverpool One, 12 College Lane, Liverpool, L1 3DL.
All welcome!
Killer on the Road
I’ve written a piece on James Ellroy’s overlooked novel Killer on the Road for the blog LaeLand. The editor of LaeLand, Lae Monie, has also kindly published an author spotlight piece on me. You can read it here.
On a different subject, fellow VV contributor Chris Routledge has republished Simon Nash’s Dead of a Counterplot (1962). Nash was the
pseudonym of Raymond Chapman, and Dead of a Counterplot was the first of five novels featuring academic and amateur detective Adam Ludlow. I read Dead of a Counterplot this weekend and found it to be a thoroughly entertaining combination of mystery and good humour. I can’t wait to read the next four in the series. You can find out more details of this project on Chris’ blog.
What Do Crime Fiction Fans Do on Vacation/Holiday?
I like this photo of Megan Abbott looking retro
It was my husband that brought me back to crime fiction after childhood dabblings in Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes, and our mutual interest has spurred some unusual holiday choices. When his research took us to the US in 2009 to meet James Ellroy in LA, we included a day of visiting famous murder scenes (my father’s SAT NAV and Ellroy’s My Dark Places came in handy here). But this year, in the spirit of austerity, our ‘staycation’ will also involve crime fiction. Most notably, we’re on our way to Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate from July 19-22nd. We’ve booked tickets to see my favourite Crime Fiction author (and fellow former suburban Detroiter) Megan Abbott, whose novel Die a Little will be part of the reading list on my Women in Crime Fiction course next year. If you can’t make it to the festival, but are looking for a great summer read, Abbott’s intense, almost poetic prose can’t be beat. Here are some reviews I’ve done on her novels: Die a Little, The End of Everything and The Song is You. Although the courses for 2012-2013 Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool aren’t listed yet, you can keep an eye on what’s coming through this link.
Cross-posted from The Prevailing Westerlies.
Crime Fiction: A Testimony
I recently came across a piece by J. Kingston Pierce for the Kirkus Reviews in which he describes how his interest in crime fiction began in his teenage years and grew to become the focus of his writing career. It’s an excellent piece, here’s the link, and it made me wonder about my own discovery of the genre.
This cover of American Tabloid caught my attention in a Bournemouth bookshop, if it hadn’t my life might have been very different
At school I struggled with maths and sciences. I enjoyed subjects such as history, religious education and sociology, where ideas could be debated and nuance and conflict shown. No subject combined all of the ‘big ideas’ of life more thrillingly than English Literature. But, as in most English literature curriculums, the focus of my high school literature course was almost exclusively on authors in the literary canon. Genre is, or at least was, a dirty word. So I had little concept of modern popular fiction until I started reading my father’s collection which included Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt adventure series and Bernard Cromwell’s Sharpe novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. These novels liberated my sense of reading. For the first time I began to experience the excitement and danger of the narrative as though I were a character in the story. I learned that great stories could be told through action, rather than just thought and dialogue, and still possess the potential for leaving a profound emotional impact on the reader. But I was soon to read a novel which kickstarted my fascination with the one genre that brought together my favourite character-types of genre fiction: spies, adventurers and detectives.
At some point in my mid-teens I was holidaying with my parents in Bournemouth in South West England. In a bookshop I noticed a book on the shelves and recognised the front cover as being an artist’s impression of the Mary Moorman photograph depicting President Kennedy’s assassination. The book was titled American Tabloid and was written by James Ellroy, who I knew very little about. A novel about the Kennedy assassination seemed interesting, so I bought it and started reading straight away. I was immediately hooked. The portrayal of intrigue and corruption in the Kennedy era was riveting. Ellroy told the story from the perspective of protagonists on the very fringes of society: Mob hitmen, rogue intelligence agents, Cuban exiles. The men who, in his fictional version of events, eventually conspire to kill Kennedy. It was from reading this novel that my obsession with and knowledge of crime fiction began to develop. Reading the novel felt like being plunged into a secret world where different rules apply. To understand these rules I needed to go back and read earlier crime novels. After reading all of Ellroy’s novels, short stories and articles, I read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to trace the development of the hard-boiled private detective, and how these stories were a reaction to the quaint style of the predominantly British Golden Age of Detective Fiction. I came to appreciate how Ed McBain discarded the private eye and developed the police procedural sub-genre with his 87th Precinct series. I was floored by the works of Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins, and how they moved the genre away from mystery plotlines towards dialogue-driven storytelling with an emphasis on humour and sudden, unpredictable outbreaks of violence. I began reading contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction and British espionage thrillers.
That being said, I maintained my interest in canonical literature and studied for an MA in Victorian Literature. However, upon completion of my MA, I returned again to the writer who had first introduced me to the world of crime fiction, James Ellroy. So I’m now in my final year of PhD studying the life and work of James Ellroy. I’ve edited a book about Ellroy, details here, and have edited an anthology about American crime writers released later this year. My obsession with crime fiction has gradually transformed into my profession, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.
If anyone else remembers fondly how they first discovered crime fiction, please share your story in the comment thread.
Scenes from Norway and Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman
As the popularity of Scandinavian noir continues to rise, I have recently started reading the work of Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo. Nesbo has become one of the biggest stars of crime writing of our time with his series detective Harry Hole rivalling Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who novels in popularity. Nesbo’s writing style has an almost gleeful disregard for realism. Even so, in novels such as The Snowman (2007), the reader gains a fascinating insight into Norwegian culture. Hole is a maverick detective who has become an expert on serial killers after training with the FBI. Like previous novels in the Hole series, Nesbo uses a straightforward crime story to examine the repercussions of a sudden outbreak of violence in a country renowned for being peaceful and prosperous, a theme which is particularly moving and topical in light of the 2011 attacks in Oslo and Utoya island in which 77 people were killed in what amounted to Norway’s most violent day since the Second World War. In the novel a series of women are abducted and murdered and a snowman is always found at the crime scene. Hole becomes convinced he is dealing with Norway’s first serial killer case, despite the scepticism of some of his colleagues:
‘And we still haven’t seen a serial killer in Norway.’ Skarre glanced at Bratt as if to make sure she was following. ‘Is it because of that FBI course you did on serial killers? Is that what’s making you see them everywhere?’
‘Maybe,’ Harry said.
‘Let me remind you that apart from that nurse feller who gave injections to a couple of old fogeys, who were at death’s door anyway, we haven’t had a single serial killer in Norway. Ever. Those guys exist in the USA, but even there usually only in films.’
‘Wrong,’ said Katrine Bratt.
The others turned to face her. She stifled a yawn.
‘Sweden, France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Russia and Finland. And we’re only talking solved cases here. No one utters a word about hidden statistics.’
The Snowman succeeds not by avoiding the clichés of crime fiction, but by embracing them. Hole is such a maverick that practically none of his investigative techniques would lead to admissible evidence; he breaks into a suspect’s office, then her house. He drives his car through a huge glass door during a chase scene. In one gloriously comic scene, Hole’s superiors march into his office with the intention of firing him and find Hole seemingly injecting drugs. The perfectly composed Hole informs them that he is injecting water, not drugs, as part of an experiment in which he proves that one character’s supposed suicide by drug overdose was in fact murder. As the narrative progresses, the clichés become more pronounced as Nesbo unleashes an anarchic style upon the story’s thrilling but preposterous climax.
Anders Breivik in Court
Part of the appeal of ‘Scandi-Noir’ in the UK and US is it gives the reader a glimpse of the dark underworld of societies which we have somewhat naively regarded as almost utopian. However, reading the coverage of the Anders Breivik trial, I cannot help but feel that Norway is still years ahead of us on some social issues. Despite committing mass murder, Breivik can by Norwegian law serve no more than 21 years in prison (unless he is declared insane), and the prison where he will serve his sentence will not be some fearful penitentiary but an institution in which prisoners are treated humanely with a focus on rehabilitation. Granted the Norwegian system was not designed for killers like Breivik, but to make it more repressive runs the risk of playing in to Breivik’s own demented views. By contrast, here in the UK people are now being given prison sentences for saying stupid and offensive things on twitter. A needlessly harsh reaction to a minor problem. Nesbo has said his country’s reaction to the Breivik case has made him proud to be Norwegian. You can read some of Nesbo’s views on the Breivik case, and how it will influence crime writing, here.
Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fiction
This May sees the release of Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fiction, a new collection of essays on crime writing edited by Vivien Miller and Helen Oakley. This is a great book for which I was thrilled to contribute an essay. The full list of contents are:
Introduction; V.Miller & H.Oakley
From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction; D.Schmid
The Fact and Fiction of Darwinism: The Representation of Race, Ethnicity and Imperialism in the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; H.A.Goldsmith
‘You’re not so special, Mr. Ford’: the Quest for Criminal Celebrity; G.Green & L.Horsley
Hard-Boiled Screwball: Genre and Gender in the Crime Fiction of Janet Evanovich; C.Robinson
‘A Wanted Man’: Transgender as Outlaw in Elizabeth Ruth’s Smoke; S.E.Billingham
Dissecting the Darkness of Dexter; H.Oakley
The Machine Gun in the Violin Case: Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets and the Gangster Musical Art Melodrama; M.Nicholls
In the Private Eye: Private Space in the Noir Detective Movie; B.Nicol
‘Death of the Author’: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Police Procedurals; C.Beyer
‘Betty Short and I Go Back’: James Ellroy and the Metanarrative of the Black Dahlia Case; S.Powell
Index
You can find out more details about the book here.
The Venetian Vase 